The invention is generally related to personal finance and money management, and more particularly, to personal finance programs that are operable to create a budget and show how consumer spending adheres to the budget. Money management and sticking to a budget are very important to consumers, but effective money management and budget analysis are often difficult to implement. These difficulties may be due to various reasons including, for example, financial information being stored in different files or at different financial institutions, consumers losing or not keeping receipts, consumers forgetting about purchases, and difficulty in collecting and compiling pertinent financial information into an understandable format. As such, consumers often analyze budgets with a piecemeal approach involving manual entry of data, referring to different graphs, spending summaries or statements, tracking the receipts that were kept and not discarded or lost, and performing calculations involving these items.
In view of these inconveniences and difficulties, various personal finance programs have been utilized to provide assistance to consumers with managing their finances and budgets. Examples of known personal finance programs include FinanceWorks®, Quicken®, Mint, Wesabe, Thrive, Geezeo, and MoneyStrands. FinanceWorks® and Quicken® are registered trademark of Intuit Inc., Mountain View, Calif., and Mint is also available from Intuit Inc.
While personal finance program have greatly improved money management, there are still various shortcomings in the manner in which budget data is presented to consumers and in view of consumers still being restrained by data availability and organization. These issues make it difficult for consumers to effectively track how spending relates to a budget, particularly considering that consumers typically spend money on a multitude of different types of goods and services at various times utilizing various forms of payment.